It doesn't skip the commercials by cutting them out. Instead, it adds chapter marks at the beginning and end of each group of commercials. You have to do an "advance to the next chapter" when commercials start. The way that works is device dependent. On an Apple TV, you hit down-arrow and a scrub bar will appear at the bottom showing the chapter marks. Hit a right-arrow to go the the next chapter or a left-arrow to go to the previous one.

My experience is that comskip works about 95% of the time and, when it works, I almost always find the chapter marks are in the right place.

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I'm not having much luck. Been trying to get comskip and the handbrake formats to create chapter marks and most of the time the resulting file is just one chapter. And even if it did work, I'm hoping to stream my shows back to my tv with a chromecast which will likely require dlna streaming and dlna doesn't really support chapters. So, I'm a bit stuck at the moment. I'm curious if there is a way to modify the h.264 formats that come in ctivo to encode with different audio settings. Does anyone have a custom format they might be willing to share? Is there an online repository of custom ctivo formats?

Is anyone else having trouble with Audio synch issues? cTivo worked perfectly for me until I upgraded to a new MacBook Pro (OS 10.9.2). Now having synch issues, especially on PBS channel. Have tried using both AppleTV and Handbrake settings.

I'm not aware of any options for actually cutting commercials in OS X but have not looked that closely since cTiVo chapter stops are exactly what I want. My guess is that you'd need to integrate something from Windows into your process using a virtual machine. I've used VideoRedo quite a bit on Windows and it works pretty well. On all the programs that actually cut the commercials, you've got to be willing to accept that on occasion, you are going to lose some of the material as well. No auto detect program is going to be 100%.

Are your programs SD or HD? I've found the commercial marking to work much better with HD shows.

Is anyone else having trouble with Audio synch issues? cTivo worked perfectly for me until I upgraded to a new MacBook Pro (OS 10.9.2). Now having synch issues, especially on PBS channel. Have tried using both AppleTV and Handbrake settings.

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Have you tried downloading the native file and manually ripping it in Handbrake? If the native file doesn't have the problem and the Handbrake rip does, you can get some help over on the Handbrake forums. Make sure you read about the problem submittal process on the HB forums. They can be a little prickly if you don't submit all the required information in the your post.

If it's happening with both Handbrake and the other encoder option, it sounds more like an OS X configuration problem.

Have you tried downloading the native file and manually ripping it in Handbrake? If the native file doesn't have the problem and the Handbrake rip does, you can get some help over on the Handbrake forums. Make sure you read about the problem submittal process on the HB forums. They can be a little prickly if you don't submit all the required information in the your post.

If it's happening with both Handbrake and the other encoder option, it sounds more like an OS X configuration problem.

HD television shows mostly. What I'm working with now is:
A) itivo on a snow leopard computer (osX 10.6.8) since itivo has the decrypt/copy option
B) manually convert with handbrake (still experimenting if this is necessary)
C) serve with plex media server
D) plex android app on my handset for control
E) Chromecast back to my TV setup

This seems like it will work but I'm finding that my 10.6.8 computer doesn't seem to hold up to the on the fly transcoding (Plex transcodes for the sake of Chromecast compatibility). During my tests so far it pauses every once in awhile during the show. I'm experimenting with different handbrake options to find something that works well. I do think I'll eventually want to move to the latest os (10.9) so I wish that ctivo had a decrypt option that would cut commercials like the old itivo does.

A Snow Leopard machine is going to be a tough row to hoe. cTiVo seems to like fast hardware and support teams like more recent software. I updated my 2011 dual core Mini to a 2012 quad core Mini and reliability improved dramatically.

You might be able to tweak cTiVo to leave a comskip "cut" file that you can use to cut the file. Use cTiVo to do the download and build your own process to mark and cut the commercials. Comskip can be extracted easily enough from the cTiVo package if trying to hack it in cTiVo gets too ugly.

It feel like you are trying to do things the hard way. If you are not targeting the Apple ecosystem, maybe you should just drop $400 on a Windows box that will run circles around a Snow Leopard era Mac. There are lots more tools available in Windows to do what you want. cTiVo is a great solution if you want something that "just works" but you have greater ambitions. I had a solid Windows process that I abandoned for cTiVo because I got tired of the support work and wanted to get out of Windows but it was faster and more flexible than cTiVo will ever be.

Is this still actively under development? Would people recommend this over kmttg for the mac? Can you delete shows with this?

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AKAIK, the developers are still working on it. It went through a busy six month period getting to a solid release but there hasn't been an update since last July. It's quite stable and reliable (at least for me) so the lack of recent activity has not been an issue. There are things that don't work for people and there's some give and take over in the code repository.

I used kmttg a bit and it worked OK. Lots of options and fiddly bits for people that enjoy that sort of thing. cTiVo is more a "just works" kind of program. If it does what you want, it's great. If you want to do something a bit different, it's not as flexible. I think most of the kmttg activity is in Windows rather than OS X.

I'm not aware of any way to delete shows off a TiVo with cTiVo or any other PC/Mac program.

You can try creating a custom Handbrake encode and tweaking the setting for dynamic range and/or gain.

-D, --drc <float> Apply extra dynamic range compression to the audio,
making soft sounds louder. Range is 1.0 to 4.0
(too loud), with 1.5 - 2.5 being a useful range.
Separated by commas for more than one audio track.
--gain <float> Amplify or attenuate audio before encoding. Does
NOT work with audio passthru (copy). Values are in
dB. Negative values attenuate, positive values
amplify. A 1 dB difference is barely audible.

@chemedly. My apologies and thanks to tannebil for his help; I haven't been getting notifications of messages here, so just happened to check today. To answer several of your questions:

1) AFAIK, mencoder does not handle 5.1 transfer, but I'm not an expert. If you find out differently on their sites, you can easily add a cTiVo format that will provide whatever command line they need. Let us know and we'll add it to the core formats as well.

2) Handbrake cannot take a SRT file and cut the file for you, as mencoder can. Unlike that video editing, cTiVo itself optionally adds the commercial mark track after conversion for any MP4 file. I agree with tannebil that process is much better than cutting, as any mistakes by comskip are a problem that can't be fixed after cutting.

3) Telling cTiVo that Handbrake can skip commercials only causes the command line options to Handbrake, it won't actually get it to do it.

4) No need to pause the queue, just select the skip option in either Preferences or the menu to get it to apply that option to all future selections.

Finally, "if there is a way to modify the h.264 formats that come in ctivo to encode with different audio settings". Yes, you should be able to use any of the encoders with any command settings you want; however, we cTiVo developers are NOT experts on those settings. We inherited a bunch with iTiVo and have updated them as we've gotten information from the field. So...if you find a setting that does what you want from those communities, you should be able to use it with cTiVo. Would love to have you submit that kind of information back to the site.

Any ideas why my Tivo is listed in cTivo but none of my recorded shows are?

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Well, one possibility is that those are all either copy-protected, or TiVo Suggestions. Both of those can be filtered (or not) in the Options menu, but they will still show up in the TiVo's count. (You can also do a Find which will filter, but your screenshot obviously shows that isn't the case here).

If that's not it, that's very odd. The count shows that we've received the show's information, so if it's not showing in the table, that's very strange. Let me know and we'll figure it out.

Versus kmttg, as one of cTiVo's developers, I might be a tad biased. On the other hand, I use kmttg regularly as well. tannebill is correct; our target was to rewrite and update iTiVo's file transfer ability, making it faster and more comprehensive without losing its ease of use. So we have a lot more Mac-like features (drag/drop, view in Finder, etc) with more simplicity and automation than KMTTG (no need to load details etc), but we don't support any TiVo management or remote control features (such as deleting files), and obviously, we're Mac only.

HD television shows mostly. What I'm working with now is:
A) itivo on a snow leopard computer (osX 10.6.8) since itivo has the decrypt/copy option
B) manually convert with handbrake (still experimenting if this is necessary)
C) serve with plex media server
D) plex android app on my handset for control
E) Chromecast back to my TV setup

This seems like it will work but I'm finding that my 10.6.8 computer doesn't seem to hold up to the on the fly transcoding (Plex transcodes for the sake of Chromecast compatibility). During my tests so far it pauses every once in awhile during the show. I'm experimenting with different handbrake options to find something that works well. I do think I'll eventually want to move to the latest os (10.9) so I wish that ctivo had a decrypt option that would cut commercials like the old itivo does.

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Well, first, we don't support Snow Leopard at all. That's very surprising, though. I didn't know that path would work with iTiVo. It must run it through an encoder to do that; which one is being called?

So, I pulled up the original iTiVo formats, and you're right. There is one called decrypt/copy that does support comskip. Basically, it's running it through mencoder with the following options, so you could create the same format in cTiVo: